Taken from “Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Phillips Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton edited by
Edward Hutchings
I
used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company, and
one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the
receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in—a man, a woman,
and a few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, “Is this where
Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?”
“This
is the place,” the receptionist replied.
The
man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
“I
don’t think you’d like ‘em much,” I say. “They’re kind of technical.”
Pretty
soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: “I bet you’re Professor
Feynman!”
It
turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work with
dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense deprivation, and
had built some tanks.
“Isn’t
it true that you’re supposed to get hallucinations under those circumstances?”
I asked, excitedly.
“That
is true indeed.”
I
had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other images
that come to the mind that haven’t got a direct sensory source, and how it
works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once thought to
take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think, and I don’t want
to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just lying around in a
sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, SO I was very anxious to
try it.
I
quickly accepted the Lillys’ invitation to use the tanks, a very kind
invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their
group.
So
the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me to the
tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of bulbs, like
neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the Periodic Table and
made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds of lights that have
different kinds of influences. He told me how you get ready to go into the tank
by looking at yourself in the mirror with your nose up against it—all kinds of
wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I didn’t pay any attention to the gorp,
but I did
everything because I wanted to get into the tanks, and I also thought that
perhaps such preparations might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I
went through everything according to the way he said. The only thing that
proved difficult was choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank
was supposed to be dark inside.
A
sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that comes down.
It’s completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick, there’s no sound.
There’s a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out you don’t need to
worry about air because the volume of air is rather large, and you’re only in
there for two or three hours, and you don’t really consume a lot of air when
you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the pumps were there to put people at
ease, so I figured it’s just psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off,
because it made a little bit of noise.
The
water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than normal water, so
you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at body temperature, or
94, or something—he had it all figured out. There wasn’t supposed to be any
light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no nothing! Once in a while you
might drift over to the side and bump slightly, or because of condensation on
the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might fall, but these slight
disturbances were very rare.
I
must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and a half
hours in the tank. The first time I didn’t get any hallucinations, but after I
had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed as a medical
doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was used as an
anesthetic. I’ve always been interested in questions related to what happens
when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out, so they showed
me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one tenth of the normal
dose.
I
got this strange kind of feeling which I’ve never been able to figure out
whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the drug
had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn’t see clearly. But when I’d
look hard at
something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you didn’t care to look at things;
you’re sloppily doing this and that, feeling kind of woozy, but as soon as you
look, and concentrate, everything is, for a moment at least, all right. I took
a book they had on organic chemistry and looked at a table full of complicated
substances, and to my surprise was able to read them.
I
did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other from a
distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I had a
feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do practically
anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn’t do.
As
I said before, the first time in the tank I didn’t get any hallucinations, and
the second time I didn’t get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very
interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch,
and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the
early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the
sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty
interesting invention. I wasn’t afraid because I knew what it was: it was just
a tank of Epsom salts.
The
third time there was a man visiting—I met many interesting people there—who
went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from Harvard who had gone to
India and had written a popular book called Be
Here Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an
“out-of-body experience” (words I had often seen written on the bulletin
board): Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as
you breathe.
I
figured I’d try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the tank. At some
stage of the game I suddenly realized that—it’s hard to explain—I’m an inch to
one side. In other words, where my breath is going, in and out, in and out, is
not centered: My ego is off to one side a little bit, by about an inch.
I
thought: “Now where is
the ego located? I know everybody thinks the seat of thinking is in the brain,
but how do they know
that?” I knew already from reading things that it wasn’t so obvious to people
before a lot of psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of
thinking was in the liver, for instance. I wondered, “Is it possible that where
the ego is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand
to their head when they say, ‘Let me think’? Therefore the idea that the ego is
located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!” I figured that if I
could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was the
beginning of my hallucinations.
I
tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle
of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt
it “up there,” above where “I” was. Every time a drop came I was startled a
little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place.
Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it took a lot of work to
go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was able to get myself all
the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was about as far as I could go
for quite a while.
It
was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could move myself
to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my body. So I was
able to “sit to one side.” It’s hard to explain—I’d move my hands and shake the
water, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew where they were. But unlike in
real life, where the hands are to each
side, part way down,
they were both to one
side! The feeling in my fingers and everything else was exactly the same as
normal, only my ego was sitting outside, “observing” all this.
From
then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to move further
and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would move my hands I
would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going up and down—they
weren’t flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still able to feel everything.
The feelings would be exactly consistent with the motion, but I also had this
feeling of “he is that.” “I” even got out of the room, ultimately, and wandered
about, going some distance to locations where things happened that I had seen
earlier another day.
I
had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example, I could
“see” the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my
fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue
sky. Of course that wasn’t right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that
as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly consistent with the motion
that I was imagining that I was seeing. The entire imagery would appear, and be
consistent with what you feel and are doing, much like when you slowly wake up
in the morning and are touching something (and you don’t know what it is), and
suddenly it becomes clear what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly
appear, except it’s unusual,
in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located in front of the back of the
head, but instead you have it behind
the back of the head.
One
of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while I was having
a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would therefore be
only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams, and I wanted a
new experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you’re having
hallucinations, and things like that, you’re not very sharp, so you do these
dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as checking that you’re not
dreaming. So I perpetually
was checking that I wasn’t dreaming by—since my hands were often behind my
head—rubbing my thumbs together, back and forth, feeling them. Of course I
could have been dreaming that, but I wasn’t: I knew it was real.
After
the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination made them
“jump out,” or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long
hallucinations.
A
week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain works
compared to how a computing machine works—especially how information is stored.
One of the interesting problems in this area is how memories are stored in the brain:
You can get at them from so many directions compared to a machine—you don’t
have to come directly with the correct address to the memory. If I want to get
at the word “rent,” for example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle,
looking for a four-letter word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be
thinking of types of income, or activities such as borrowing and lending; this
in turn can lead to all sorts of other related memories or information. I was
thinking about how to make an “imitating machine,” which would learn language
as a child does: you would talk to the machine. But I couldn’t figure out how
to store the stuff in an organized way so the machine could get it out for its
own purposes.
When
I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried to think of
very early memories. I kept saying to myself, “It’s gotta be earlier; it’s
gotta be earlier”—I was never satisfied that the memories were early enough.
When I got a very early memory—let’s say from my home town of Far Rockaway—then
immediately would come a whole sequence of memories, all from the town of Far
Rockaway. If I then would think of something from another city—Cedarhurst, or
something—then a whole lot of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would
come. And so I realized that things are stored according to the location where you had
the experience.
I
felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had a shower,
got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft to give my
weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I came out of
the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I hadn’t the
slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had was a
hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had
“discovered” had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the brain;
it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself.
In
our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits, I had been
trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that things are real
does not represent true reality.
If you see golden globes, or something, several times, and they talk to you
during your hallucination and tell you they are another intelligence, it
doesn’t mean
they’re another intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular
hallucination. So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how
memories are stored, and it’s surprising that it took forty-five minutes before
I realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else.
One
of the questions I thought about was whether hallucinations, like dreams, are
influenced by what you already have in your mind—from other experiences during
the day or before, or from things you are expecting to see. The reason, I
believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we were discussing
out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank. And the reason I had
a hallucination about how memories are stored in the brain was, I think, that I
had been thinking about that problem all week.
I
had considerable discussion with the various people there about the reality of
experiences. They argued that something is considered real, in experimental
science, if the experience can be reproduced. Thus when many people see golden
globes that talk to them, time after time, the globes must be real. My claim
was that in such situations there was a bit of discussion previous to going
into the tank about the golden globes, so when the person hallucinating, with
his mind already thinking about golden globes when he went into the tank, sees
some approximation of the globes—maybe they’re blue, or something—he thinks
he’s reproducing the experience. I felt that I could understand the difference
between the type of agreement among people whose minds are set to agree, and
the kind of agreement that you get in experimental work. It’s rather amusing
that it’s so easy to tell the difference—but so hard to define it!
I
believe there’s nothing
in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the
internal psychological state of the person who’s got the hallucination. But
there are nevertheless a lot of experiences by a lot of people who believe
there’s reality in hallucinations. The same general idea may account for a
certain amount of success that interpreters of dreams have. For example, some
psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking about the meanings of various
symbols. And then, it’s not completely impossible that these symbols do appear
in dreams that follow. So I think that, perhaps, the interpretation of
hallucinations and dreams is a self-propagating process: you’ll have a general,
more or less, success at it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of
time.
Ordinarily
it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a
few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly.
But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.
One
thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming on, what you
might describe as “garbage” would come: there were simply chaotic
images—complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the items of the junk
in order to be able to characterize it again, but it was particularly difficult
to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind of thing that happens when
you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent logical connections, but when you
try to remember what made you think of what you’re thinking about, you can’t
remember. As a matter of fact, you soon forget what it is that you’re trying to
remember. I can only remember things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in
Chicago, and then it disappears. That kind of stuff all the time.
Mr.
Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of different
experiments. It didn’t seem to make much difference as far as hallucinations
were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was unnecessary. Now that
I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do is sit quietly—why was it
necessary that you had to have everything absolutely super duper?
So
when I’d come home I’d turn out the lights and sit in the living room in a
comfortable chair, and try and try—it never worked. I’ve never been able to
have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would like to have done it at
home, and I don’t doubt that you could meditate and do it if you practice, but I didn’t
practice.